Royal Caribbean Line Fined $3 Million

November 4, 1999|By TOM STIEGHORST Business Writer

Royal Caribbean Cruises was sentenced on Wednesday to pay $3 million in fines for polluting the waters off South Florida, capping a series of ocean-dumping cases that cost the Miami-based cruise line $27 million.

Even as U.S. District Court Judge Donald Middlebrooks approved the deal, however, prosecutors disclosed that Royal Caribbean had withheld a 1995 court document that indicated a previously unsuspected ship, the Sun Viking, had also violated U.S. pollution laws.

The lack of disclosure cost the cruise line an additional $1 million, which was agreed to when Royal Caribbean entered its guilty plea to environmental charges in six federal court districts on July 21 and agreed to pay an $18 million fine.

The $3 million fine imposed Wednesday was the South Florida portion of the $18million total.

Details about the Sun Viking were not made public until Wednesday because they were related to a grand jury investigation. At sentencing, prosecutors moved to make them public and Middlebrooks agreed.

The Sun Viking came under suspicion when a former Royal Caribbean employee fired from the ship brought suit in Norway in 1995 for wrongful termination. A court pleading in the case included a photograph of a special pipe that was used to bypass the oil-water separator on the Sun Viking and dump oily water overboard.

Royal Caribbean engineers had installed such pipes on several other ships to cut costs.

The cruise line's Norwegian attorney translated the pleading into English and sent it to company headquarters in Miami. But although the document should have been surrendered under three grand jury subpoenas, it was withheld until Royal Caribbean hired a new attorney, Robert Fiske, earlier this year, prosecutors said.

Until then, Royal Caribbean had argued the pleading was protected by attorney-client privilege, they said.

In court Wednesday, company president Jack Williams said Royal Caribbean has changed.

"Those actions that were uncovered by the investigation were wrong and they never should have occurred," he said.

Williams has had to make a similar admission in four other federal courts. "This has been a very long and exhausting process," he told Middlebrooks.

Of the $3 million fine imposed on Wednesday, $500,000 will go to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

The company will also be on probation for five years. The specific counts to which it pleaded guilty in South Florida include dumping wastewater that included dry-cleaning and photographic chemicals from six ships while they were moored at the Port of Miami in 1995.

The $18 million fine agreed to this year is in addition to a $9million fine paid by Royal Caribbean in a 1998 plea deal.

In summarizing the case, Thomas Watts-FitzGerald, chief of the environmental crimes section at the U.S. Attorney's Office, said there was a widespread perception at Royal Caribbean and other ship companies that they are not subject to U.S. laws.

"One thing the industry should take away from these cases is [that] that is not so," Watts-FitzGerald said.